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At this peak a couple of years ago, Josef Penninger was one of the hottest, most charming scientists in the world. From his lab on Toronto's hospital row, Penninger, a fearless anarchist, loved to demolish accepted wisdom as he swooped over a stunningly broad scientific landscape--bone, pain, cancer, heart disease and the immune system.He churned out so many papers in the world's most prestigious scientific journals that for two years running, in 1999 and 2000, the trend-tracker 'Science Watch' said Penninger was among the world's most quoted scientific researchers. Penninger's boss was Tak Mak, the wiry, hard-driven 56-year-old Hong Kong immigrant who has won nearly every scientific prize, except for the Nobel, for his discovery of the holy grail of the immune system.

In March, accepting the Oscar for best documentary feature, director Michael Moore stood on stage with a phalanx of his fellow nominees and defended the notion of non-fiction. He was using it as a conceit to attack the "fictional" presidency of U.S. President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. But the director of "Bowling for Columbine" was also taking a stand for documentary truth in the face of industrial illusion--even if some would argue that there's as much conjuring as journalism in Moore's work. Last week (April 25-May 4), Toronto celebrated the 10th anniversary of Hot Docs, North America's largest documentary festival. And some of the festival's most powerful entries were Canadian--notably "The Last Round," about George Chuvalo's stoical defeat to Muhammad Ali in 1966, "Men of the Deeps," an eloquent portrait of Cape Breton coal miners, and "Rage Against the Darkness," a harrowing tale of two aging sisters warehoused in separate institutions.